Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [63]
REMEMBER THE GOOD STUFF THAT YOU CARE ABOUT
Make a list of everything you value about your relationship and put it aside for a rainy day. Be an optimist, turn your mind to the positive end of things. Value what you have and what you get from your partner: the time, attention, and love, the good stuff that fills your cup. Avoid being the pessimist who focuses on what is not there, the energy that goes somewhere else. That energy is not subtracted from what you receive; relationships are not balanced like checkbooks. So when you are feeling deprived, remember all the good stuff you get from your partnership.
EXERCISE Treasures
Make a list of ten or more reasons why you are lucky to have this partner. Make a list of ten or more reasons why your partner is lucky to have you. Try carrying your lists around with you for a few days and adding things as they come up. Maybe you and this partner could both make lists and share them.
Sharing
You and your partners need to practice talking about jealousy. When you try to pretend that you’re so perfectly enlightened that you never feel jealous, you deprive yourself of the opportunity to work with your feelings and share support with your partner. And when you try to protect yourself and your partner from jealousy, you are engaging in a deception that can only lead to more distance and can never bring you closer.
A couple we know tell us that they have developed a convention in their relationship that each can ask the other for what they call a “jelly moment.” In your jelly moment, you get to say what’s bothering you. Perhaps you feel scared and jealous, nervous about saying goodbye for the weekend, small and silly, and your knees are feeling like, well, jelly. Your partner’s commitment is to listen, sympathize, and validate. That’s the response: not “Okay, I’ll cancel my date with Blanche,” but “Aw, honey, I’m sorry you feel bad. I love you, and I’ll be back soon.”
When we tell our partners that we feel jealous, we are making ourselves vulnerable in a very profound way. When our partners respond with respect, listen to us, validate our feelings, support and reassure us, we feel better taken care of than we would have if no difficulty had arisen in the first place. So we strongly recommend that you and your partners give each other the profoundly bonding experience of sharing your vulnerabilities. We are all human, we are all vulnerable, and we all need validation.
Your strategies for surviving periods of jealousy will stand you in good stead for the rest of your life, and you will use what you learn about yourself from this practice over and over. All of the techniques listed above are applicable to other difficult events, like job interviews and writing your resume. Now you not only have a repertoire of ways to deal with bouts of jealousy but also to handle other painful emotions that may come your way. So when you get this far, congratulate yourself. Celebrate your successes: Write “I am a genius” two dozen times with lots of bright colors. Buy yourself something nifty. You’ve done a lot of hard work, and you deserve a reward.
A Spiritual Path?
So when you grow beyond your jealousy by doing the healing that your jealousy is calling on you to do, you’re also stepping out of old paradigms and familiar assumptions, into the unknown, which is scary. Working to change your emotions requires that you open up, be willing to feel, flinching when necessary, to become more conscious. Isn’t that what spirituality is, an opened and expanded consciousness?
Jealousy can become your path, not only to healing old wounds but also to openheartedness—opening your heart to your lovers and to yourself as you open your relationships to fit in all the love and sex and fulfillment that truly are available to you.
A final note about love: One remedy for the fear of not being loved is to remember how good it feels to